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First 100 Days: Kill Whitey

Stephen Sheehi

Contributor

Whitey is in the White House. Whitey is in Congress. Whitey is in law enforcement. Whitey is in ours churches, in our synagogues, and yes, in our mosques. Whitey is in the classrooms as readily as the board room. Whitey resides as easily in Newsweek than as in the National Review or Breitbart. Whitey is in New York and Los Angeles as frequently as he is in Scranton and Charleston. Look in the mirror because that is where Whitey is. You and me. We all conjured Whitey to power and now we have to fuckin’ kill Whitey*. But, remember, Whitey does not die. You only kill him in perpetual deaths.

The Confederacy Has Won

Whitey is a vampiric fascist fuck, who is only killed until the next sequel (slavery, Jim Crow South, Reaganomics, the Contract on America, the Neocons, the Trumpocracy). While Whitey is not singular or partisan, we must focus on the Trumpocalypse: Whitey-in-Chief, Team-Whitey, and its deconstructed state, which is the embodiment of the victorious Confederacy.

I hear Whitey, “Stephen, you are playing the regional card. The Orange Scoundrel is a well-known racist and son of a slumlord.” No, I am saying that, if you want to understand the politics of this current regime including the Republican Party, you best look at the history, political discourse, phantasy, and desires of the Confederacy and the South, which especially hinges on the deflecting discourse of “states’ rights.”

Listen to the language of the Confederacy and understand the afterlives of its burning phantasy in the South. The South is a place where Whitey segregates his own racism and gives self-affirmation to his own liberalism, Whitey’s version of soft power. Whitey’s liberal smugness deafened us to hear “the South will rise again” for what it is: a threat and a disclosure of Whitey’s repressed desire for white supremacy, locked away below the Mason Dickson’s racial unconscious. And while liberal Whitey rolled his eyes at the Stars and Bars (in a discomforting, unconscious fear of disclosure), people of color always held that anxiety of self-knowledge for him. Liberal smugness dampened the full resonance of what is meant by “states’ rights,” which we hear clearly now as the discordance of “deconstructing” the state in order to leave no obstacle (“regulations”) to Whitey’s race privilege and no protection from Whitey’s full psychopathic desire and avarice.

How to Kill Whitey

Whitey is about identification(s). Whitey is about politics and about economics. But Whitey is also about the psyche and the unconscious. Whitey is in us all, no matter what race, class, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. We all harbor Whitey’s desires, Whitey’s love of capital, Whitey’s pathological obsession with individualism. We all are cops. We all want to snitch on the Anarchists, who are either “lawbreakers” or wreck our “kumbaya” by visibly (and bravely) challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. Pacifist and liberal Whitey jumps to delegitimize violence as a political tool because it causes dissonance in Whitey’s unconscious. Liberal Whitey disavows violence. He calls the cops on skateboarders, “looters and pie-throwers” but also on the hooded black teenager who walks at night, Skittles in hand, through our gated communities. Deep down, we know that we are beneficiaries of state violence, capitalist individualism, and racial and class hierarchy, all the while holding our protest signs.

Yet, while there are many places Whitey resides, we move from the most immediate to eventually arrive at the camouflaged. Right now, Whitey’s most imminent threat is in a white enthnonationalist White House, where unabashed anti-Semites and racists, women-haters, and climate change deniers flash white supremacist signs and talk of states’ rights and alt-facts.

We kill Whitey by resisting economic models of governance, states’ rights, and the logic of the security state. Do not cooperate. Not with Republicans. Not with Democrats who want to search for “middle” or “common ground” with the “reasonable” opposition. That is Whitey mediating his power. Our weapons, at this point, are only obfuscation, resistance, attrition, organization, and mobilization. Listen to the impossible, to voices that you dismissed as “unreasonable,” as “idealistic,” as not “winnable.” If you are confused by the vertigo of losing power, be quiet, be brave, and listen to that feeling of your falling. That is the world that black and brown people feel from day to day in the United States. That is the feeling of living under occupation by Whitey. But from that space arises a power to resist, to transform. In the free fall, the choice exists to relinquish privilege or identify with it (hence, the terms reactionary or revolutionary). From that space, we exorcise identifications with Whitey by following the seditious love for the Other. We push through Whitey’s vampiric embrace to embrace what you can never understand: the pain of the Other, a pain that Whitey created. Allow yourself to sit with that tension, guilt, and realization of the true topography of White privilege. From that perpetual realization, Whitey will never be safe.

*Attention FBI, law enforcement, and all security services who will be reading this, most likely, from my computer before you read it on-line. This piece does not advocate the assassination or killing of any federal, state, or local official. It does, however, take issue with your responsibility in prosecuting the radical white nationalist insurgency that has now infiltrated the Executive Branch and that is systematically dismantling all three branches of the federal government. Unless you help kill Whitey, I suggest that you spend less time reading the works of those of us who dissent and more time in ferreting out the violent fascists in your own midst.]